David

by Ray Robertson

  “Quite a remarkable little pill, actually,” he says. “Called Blue Mass. The key ingredient is mercury—that’s what gives it its real acting power. The late President Lincoln was a devoted user, I understand. Can’t ask for a stronger recommendation than that, can one?”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Why, you’re most welcome, Mr. King.”

  *

  I couldn’t prove it, but when I received a letter from Anderson Abbott—Dr. Anderson Abbott—inviting me to come and visit him at his new home soon after he moved back to Chatham, the year after the war ended, I knew that the Reverend King was behind it. I’d met Dr. Abbott only twice, when he’d returned to Elgin for short visits during his time studying in Toronto, but I’d only been a boy, little chance he would have remembered me, or remembered me well enough to want to see me again ten years later. But I pressed my suit and shined my shoes and showed up on the appointed day anyway. If the Reverend King believed he could accomplish with his proxy what he hadn’t been able to do in person—get me to admit I was a chronically lying, spiritually lost drug addict—it would be a pleasure to have his appointed messenger deliver him the news that I was a man of unassailable integrity and conviction, even if what I was convinced of wasn’t entirely clear.

  The Reverend King was clever, I’d grant him that; he knew whom to have check up on me. Dr. Abbott was who I was supposed to have been if everything had gone according to plan, God’s and otherwise. Although his father had been a free-born Negro, the family had fled Alabama when the Mobile city council passed a law requiring all free Blacks to post a bond signed by two white men guaranteeing their good behaviour and to wear badges proving they’d been bonded. The family eventually immigrated to Toronto, where Dr. Abbott was born, but, wanting his son to have the best education available, Mr. Abbott sent him away to study at the already renowned Buxton school, where he was among the Reverend King’s first six graduates. From there to Knox College, of course, but, instead of going on to study theology, matriculating in medicine at the age of twenty-three at the University of Toronto, becoming Canada’s first native-born Negro doctor. Soon after enlisting in the Union army as a surgeon, he was appointed overseer of two different Washington hospitals for the duration of the war. The Reverend King would keep the entire Settlement informed of each graduate’s achievements and honours, but made a special point of ensuring that I was personally aware of every step, no matter how small, along the way of Dr. Abbott’s exemplary professional ascension.

  “You put me in mind of Dr. Abbott when he was a young man,” he’d said.

  It didn’t matter how, it was an honour just to be compared, but, “In what way?” I said.

  The Reverend King looked at me for a moment. We were in his office, going over that week’s supplementary reading assignment. “Tenacity,” he finally answered.

  I was flattered, but confused. The Reverend King could tell.

  “When confronted with a problem or a task, no matter how difficult, neither of you will repine.”

  I was still flattered, but just as confused, so simply nodded and put my head back down to the page. There was work to do.

  The letter said that Dr. Abbott lived on Maple Street, so I didn’t have far to walk from my rooming house. Even though I was standing out front and had double-checked the address twice, I still wasn’t convinced I had the right house. It didn’t make sense somehow that someone that I knew—someone coloured that I knew—could live somewhere this large or this nice.

  There were green, cooling vines crawling up all three brick storeys and an enormous maple tree shading the majority of the front lawn. The windows on the upper floors were bare and mirrored back the bright July sunshine, each windowpane its own four-square sun. I turned the brass bell handle and Dr. Abbott himself opened the door.

  “David. Please, come in.”

  We shook hands inside.

  Paintings hung from every wall, landscapes and religious scenes and portraits of people Dr. Abbott must have known. There was a mahogany side table just inside the door supporting a vase of freshly cut flowers, from his own garden no doubt. A cylinder-top writing table and bookcase appeared more ornamental than operational.

  “Let’s go into my office,” Dr. Abbott said, and I followed him to the rear of the house.

  Men and things sometimes shrink, seem disappointingly reduced in size or status once one has grown up. Not Dr. Abbott. He was still taller than me and still walked with perfect posture and an unhurried step and still looked like, if he hadn’t decided to use his long fingers and dinner-plate-sized hands to heal the sick, he could have easily survived as an executioner without having to resort to anything so crude as a noose.

  “Please, David, sit down.”

  Unbelievable. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bursting with many of the same titles; the placement of the desk directly in front of the window; the dual reading chairs stationed at the exact same angles on either side of the fireplace—it was as if he’d imported the Reverend King’s office directly from Buxton to Chatham. The only thing substantially different was significant, however: an anomalously ornate carved gilt table with a marble top supporting a decanter full of what appeared to be whiskey alongside an ice bucket and several glasses. Most Elgin residents remained lifelong teetotallers.

  He must have seen me staring. “Would you care for a drink?” Dr. Abbott said.

  The Reverend King had to have told him about my expulsion from the Settlement, so I knew he’d expect me to feel embarrassed and refuse his offer.

  “I would, thank you, yes,” I said. Even though I didn’t. Even though whiskey in the afternoon seemed as inappropriate to me as spare ribs in the morning.

  “I was hoping you’d say yes,” Dr. Abbott said, pouring our drinks. “I usually see patients in the afternoon, but I’ve cleared my schedule so we can talk, and I don’t like to drink alone.”

  Handing me my whiskey, he saw that I’d spotted another decorative deviation, a plaid shawl laid under glass like a museum piece. He sat down in the chair opposite mine by the unlit fire. The leather embroidery of his seat made a soft hissing sound.

  “Mrs. Lincoln gave that to me,” he said, sipping his drink. He said it without emphasis, as if he were describing a medical fact.

  Since he’d brought it up, I felt permitted to take another, longer look. “Not Mrs. Abraham Lincoln,” I said.

  Dr. Abbott smiled. “Yes, that Mrs. Lincoln.”

  We sipped our drinks. Wherever he got his whiskey, it wasn’t from any saloon in Chatham, at least not any I’d visited in the last year. It tasted like it existed for more than just getting drunk.

  “It’s the shawl President Lincoln wore on his way to the first inauguration. It was part of the disguise he wore on that occasion to help escape assassination.” This last word hung in the air between us like a bad odour. We both drank to pretend it wasn’t there.

  “You must have been important,” I said. “Your job, I mean. You must have done important work during the war.”

  “No more than any other man who was willing to die for our cause. And those who did.”

  My face flooded furious, and it had nothing to do with the whiskey in my belly. “I wanted to fight, but the Reverend King wouldn’t let me,” I said. Instead of seeming defiant, I only managed to sound petulant, like I was still complaining about how someone had taken my favourite ball away from me when I was eight years old.

  Dr. Abbott nodded into his drink, but I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. “I seem to recall that the last time the Reverend King wrote to me during the war mentioning your progress, he said you were preparing for entrance into Knox College.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But you didn’t go.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Between work, whiskey, and generally growing used to doing whatever I wanted, I’d done a good job during my first year in Chatham of forgetting I’d
ever lived anywhere else or had any other ambition. I swallowed what was left in my glass. “May I have another, please?”

  “Of course.”

  I splashed more whiskey into my glass like I’d seen bartenders do on Saturday night when things would get so busy there wasn’t time to measure out an even shot. “I didn’t go because the Reverend King wouldn’t let me.”

  “I’m sorry, David. Are we still talking about the war?”

  I sat back down with my drink. “Of course not. I’m talking about Knox College. The Reverend King withdrew his support of me. His promised support.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Dr. Abbott, please don’t condescend to me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I know that you know what happened between the Reverend King and me. At least, what he believes happened.”

  “David, I can assure you, I don’t.”

  “Then why did you invite me here today?” Dr. Abbott looked at me as if I were simple. “Because I wanted to know why you didn’t continue your education. The Reverend King always emphasized what high hopes he had for you.”

  “Please, Dr. Abbott, I asked you to please not—”

  Dr. Abbott held up his hand. I stopped talking. “When I came to Chatham to set up my practice and I eventually paid the Reverend King a visit, he said nothing of you.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing. In fact, I thought it peculiar—as, as I’ve said already, he was very proud of you and rarely failed to mention this. So I finally asked him about you—that I expected you were in Toronto by now, and I wondered how you were getting along—and that’s when he told me you had been living in Chatham. And when I asked him what you were doing, he said he did not know. And then, when I asked him why you weren’t attending the university as had been planned, he said I would have to ask you and that he did not wish to speak of the matter any further.”

  He had to be telling the truth. I could hear the Reverend King saying the words he was only repeating. I couldn’t stop hearing them.

  “I suppose I don’t wish to speak of it any longer either.”

  Dr. Abbott looked at me over his glass like he was giving me an opportunity to change my mind. I didn’t.

  “Thank you for the drink,” I said, standing up. Dr. Abbott did the same. “I have to be going.”

  Dr. Abbott walked me out of his office the way the Reverend King used to do. I hadn’t noticed his medical degree on the wall on the way in. There were also framed documents verifying his status as president of the Chatham Literacy and Debating Society and president of the Chatham Medical Society.

  I stopped at the door. “I hope you don’t think I was being rude. When I said I didn’t wish to talk about what we were talking about.”

  “I respect a man’s reasons for speaking or not speaking.”

  “It’s only that . . . things aren’t always as simple as they sometimes should be.”

  “They rarely are,” Dr. Abbott said, smiling, straightening his medical degree—lifting, then dropping, then lifting again its bottom left corner with a careful forefinger. “When I offered my services as a surgeon to the Union army, I was called to Washington for examination. I believed it was merely a formality, as I had been told it had been for the other surgeons who’d already been accepted for service. Much later, a member of the examining board who became a friend of mine told me that the Surgeon General had pledged never to allow any Negro the title of surgeon in his army as long as he was entrusted with that position. According to my friend, there was also a Dr. Cronyn, the president of the examining board, who was asked by the irate Surgeon General: ‘I say, Cronyn, how did you come to let that nigger pass?’ And Dr. Cronyn replied: ‘The fact is, General, that nigger knew more than I did. I could not help myself.’”

  *

  The sky is beginning to crumble crimson, so I know it’s time to go to work. Except for the first Saturday of every other month that George comes to visit, I haven’t seen the sun set in nearly ten years. I’m not complaining; my early Chatham years, my factory years, were a workday blur of surly early mornings. But such a favourable day today for making some significant reading headway—the snow falling lazily outside, the fire crackling busily in here, the fading late afternoon sunlight—my body just doesn’t want to do what my brain keeps telling it to, to get up and put my coat and hat on and walk through the snow to Sophia’s. So pleasant the scene, in fact, it seems almost enough to sit here with a volume, any volume, on my knee and spend the evening simply admiring the walls of books that surround me.

  I’m not vain about much, but there’s no better private library in Chatham than mine. Which is akin, I realize, to claiming credit for being the most moral man in Hades, but someone has to be number one, and I’m him. Thanks, in great part, to Mr. Richard A. Stevens, Esq.

  When I had this house built—I’d bought the land first, with the initial trickle of money I’d accumulated after opening Sophia’s—the bookshelves were designed for more than just a few books: I wanted a library large enough to double as a personal challenge. Qualitatively I was fine, owned maybe two hundred good editions in total, each volume individually purchased with the understanding that you eat what’s in front of you and don’t ask for more until your plate has been scraped and scoured clean. But good intentions rarely make it past the age of forty. Halfway to the tomb, it doesn’t matter so much anymore that you’re not likely to get though all eight volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or that Boswell’s Life of Johnson’s two thousand pages are probably a thousand more than you’re ever going to read. Life’s sundial suddenly way past noon, time’s ticking shadow makes it absolutely essential to acquire every book that’s ever been written that’s worth reading, if not to actually read, then at least to call one’s own. I promised myself on my fortieth birthday that I would not die without a copy of Plutarch’s Lives of the Poets left among my worldly possessions. When the time came for indifferent strangers to haul my lifeless body out the back door of my home, I wanted it made perfectly clear that I was a man who had possessed the best that has been thought and said.

  So when Thompson mentioned one night at Sophia’s that one of his firm’s clients in London was having them administer an estate sale on her behalf that included the entirety of her late husband’s substantial library, there was only one thing I needed to know.

  “Was the husband a minister?”

  “A professor. Of philology, I believe.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I want to buy the library.”

  “But you haven’t seen it. It’s customary in the occasion of estate sales for—”

  “Make this happen for me, Thompson. This is something I need you to do.”

  “Yes, but David—”

  “Make it happen, Thompson.”

  Thompson’s tab wasn’t then the leviathan it is now, but was well on its way. Any smart businessman is happy to have his clients owe him money. Why else would banks be in the business of handing out loans? Jesus didn’t put his sandal to the backsides of the moneylenders because he couldn’t negotiate a competitive interest rate.

  Thompson did what needed to be done, and I got a thousand books with the nameplate Ex Libris Richard A. Stevens, Esq. embossed inside the front cover of each. After a week of sorting and separating—no one but a professor of philology needs to own more than a single volume of philology—I was left with nearly eight hundred first-rate books, heavy on the Greeks, strong in all the major Germans (most in the original, but some in translation), and with a surprising emphasis on nineteenth-century English verse. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Richard A. Stevens, Esq., introducing us, for example, I might never have made the acquaintance of Keats and Shelley. It’s still one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

  Sometimes, though, I worry I’m not living up to my half of the relationship, that I’m letting my old friend Mr. Stevens down. So, r
egardless of whatever books I happen to be spending time with—at the moment, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus interspersed with Huxley’s Evidence of Man’s Place in Nature: full-moon, full-throated raving magic interspersed with hard and dry daybreak common sense—I always keep an attentive eye, literally, on my library shelves, shelves squirming with books bought with good money and better intentions but many of which haven’t been picked up since the honeymoon day of their purchase—and sulking, I know, feeling abandoned and forlorn and screaming their silent yearning to be taken down and dusted off and opened up and brought back to life.

  When I was sixteen and read Bishop Berkeley’s The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous for the first time, the evidence for God’s existence I was supposed to ferret out and commit to memory as per the Reverend King’s instructions was secondary to the wallop of logic that delivered me there, Berkeley’s meticulously convincing claim that material objects exist only through being perceived. For several days afterward, every time I found myself somewhere other than at home, a part of me would suffer a pinprick of panic that my mother’s and my house was in danger of disappearing because I wasn’t there to perceive it. Thankfully, a week later I was too busy trying to keep Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason distinct from his Critique of Practical Reason to be worried that our house might vanish into the intellectual atmosphere whenever I left for school in the morning.

  But a book unread is dead. You can call yourself a collector and stand the leather-bound volumes side by side, row upon row, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, but all you’re doing is building an impressive cemetery, a graveyard of words where no one comes to visit and it’s hard even to remember who’s buried there. For a book to breathe it needs to be held, paid attention to, lived with, the same as any other living thing.

  But don’t worry, Mr. Richard A. Stevens, Esq. I’ve got both eyes on all four walls. Your books—my books—our books—aren’t going anywhere.

  *

  I never saw Dr. Abbott again—our circles weren’t the sort to intersect—but he was the one who taught me how to hate my life.